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Energy Bike Update

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This Year, Time's Up volunteers spent countless hours doing research and development to make our energy bikes as efficient, user-friendly, and reliable as possible. We updated both our stands and electrical assemblies. Here, we provide you with our reasoning, our parts lists, and an instructional video:

The Stands: we moved from a direct-contact wheel-to-roller design, to a belt drive. The belt drive is almost 50% more efficient, far less likely to fail, and virtually silent and mess-free.

Electrical Assemblies: we designed two new systems, one with an ultracapacitor instead of a battery, and one that can be plugged directly into a wall outlet to lessen the energy you use from the grid.

The Ultracapacitor: by using an ultracapacitor instead of a battery, we have removed the heaviest, most expensive, least environmentally friendly, and part most likely to fail from the electrical assembly. Because batteries can hold so much charge, people were discharging them without pedaling, ruining the batteries. Ultracapacitors will only supply energy while being powered by the, and they are not ruined when you let them discharge. They are also a great educational tool, because they have a nominal voltage of 12. When you plug a device into the inverter, you see the voltage drop and you have to pedal harder to keep charging.

Grid-Tie: Our Grid-Tie version goes directly from the stand, to a grid-tie inverter, to a watt's up meter, to a wall outlet. This version is extremely simple and elegant. It can be plugged into any wall outlet to reduce the amount of power you use from the gas-burning grid.